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Honestly, I prefer benchmarks on hardware so using the same distro measured across slightly different hardware configurations or just a benchmark on a particular hardware component.

It seems distros vary too much for benchmarks and there's so many variations in the packages and the versions. It seems to be a very subjective viewpoint and although there's benchmarks to examine here, there doesn't seem to be too many deal breakers unless you're partial towards a certain distribution. It's a matter of personal taste, to put it simply?

I'm not an Ubuntu fanatic nor do I preach to use Ubuntu over others but I use it because I'm not adept enough at something more complicated or more hands-on like Slackware and Gentoo (related distros). Also, I started with Debian and prefer to improve my knowledge and expertise (lol) with it or debian-based distros rather than jump into something significantly different.

Yeah, Linux is Linux but imho, better to excel in one than be somewhat proficient in a few or several. However, I do like Red Hat and Fedora and I think it's good to have considerable exposure in at least one of those.

Given a choice, I prefer benchmarks between video cards/drivers, for e.g., over distro comparisons.

I doubt I'd be able to tell the difference between distros much, anyway, so if there are any benchmarks to provide vital info, I think comparisons of desktop environments would prove more useful. Perhaps, a measurement or comparison of how well distros integrate DEs would be interesting, too?

Debian is now alive because of Ubuntu, people tend to overlook how subtle but effective under the hood changes are bought by Ubuntu dev team to make Debian look what it is today

You are implying that Canonical is improving Debian, that's news for me. Great, so I can install Ubuntu packages on Debian.
Can't you see how many distros are Debian based?
How many is SuSE based? Red Hat and Fedora are another story, they got plenty distros based on them, just like Debian and there is Slackware, who also got some distros based on it.

Debian is alive with or without Utuntu.

You mention Sheldon. For someone with IQ 187, I expect custom based GNU/Linux from scratch or something.

Originally Posted by Panix

I think comparisons of desktop environments would prove more useful. Perhaps, a measurement or comparison of how well distros integrate DEs would be interesting, too?

The best integration is vanilla integration. Regarding this, I admit that KDE4 done very good job compared to GNOME, but again, I am more toward GNOME and Xfce4, in general, GTK+ apps.

@linuxforall
You are implying that Canonical is improving Debian, that's news for me. Great, so I can install Ubuntu packages on Debian.
Can't you see how many distros are Debian based?
How many is SuSE based? Red Hat and Fedora are another story, they got plenty distros based on them, just like Debian and there is Slackware, who also got some distros based on it.

Debian is alive with or without Utuntu.

You mention Sheldon. For someone with IQ 187, I expect custom based GNU/Linux from scratch or something.

The best integration is vanilla integration. Regarding this, I admit that KDE4 done very good job compared to GNOME, but again, I am more toward GNOME and Xfce4, in general, GTK+ apps.

I'm on the fence w.r.t. Ubuntu. I like to think I understand the critics and the supporters. I was a skeptic after watching a video about Ubuntu's upstream contribution. But, there's supporters who will explain something else that puts Ubuntu in a good light at other things. Ubuntu has done a lot of marketing, for Linux, right? For itself, yes, but dabbling in Ubuntu often leads to trying out other distros. A lot of Linux users who first learned on Ubuntu or just tried out Ubuntu move to Debian. At least, that's the impression I get.

I can't comment on Canonical's 'improvement' of Debian. I've read different things on that. I think there's other issues to concentrate on that's more worthwhile than slamming Ubuntu.

linuxforall, ubuntu was hyped even before the first release. It brought nothing special to the table. It is just another leech. There were and are tons of other windozer-friendly distros out there - they just don't have a Shuttleworth paying for lots of PR.

Since lucid very much is changed in the ubuntu X architecture. The way to switch mesa/fglrx/nvidia drivers is not in debian. So those packages are not compatible anymore at all. The rest is similar, but more restricted/themed. As many u devs are d devs of course d gains something there too. it is a bit tricky to use u kernels on debian. had to change serveral packages to compile em on d.

Ubuntus PR is worth a lot to ALL of us Linux Users

Originally Posted by energyman

linuxforall, ubuntu was hyped even before the first release. It brought nothing special to the table. It is just another leech. There were and are tons of other windozer-friendly distros out there - they just don't have a Shuttleworth paying for lots of PR.

What a silly thing to say.
Ubuntu may not have as deep a bench technically as Red Hat or Novell/Suse, but their consumer focused offering is in every way complementary to the server focused, or hacker focused distros, and they have invested far more resources than the various one-man "user friendly" distros I can think of.
If you think millions of dollars in PR is worth nothing then you should have been satisfied with the status quo before Ubuntu.
Nobody outside of the computer science field had ever heard of Linux.

I cringe at the thought of a world where, even as the world fills up with devices secretly running Linux under the hood, the end users of the world think they have to choose between Steve Balmer and Steve Jobs.

Billions of dollars in PR is EXACTLY what GNU/Linux needs to put the general purpose OS vendors out of business (at least out of the business of being general purpose OS vendors).

I look forward to the day when Microsoft desperately releases its free "community edition" of windows 8, but can't get anyone to download it

bring gentoo to the table with global optimizations level 3 and link time optimization and we will see who gets owned. hehe. but i do agree with the benchmarks, rpm distros tend to have better graphics performance by default than any other types of distros. remember I said "by DEFAULT". ofcourse if you tweak it up, you will get the exact same performance on all of them. this is offtopic, but anyways, thank you arch linux users for rcreating this wonderful thing called the aur, i made a lot of things possible on my ubuntu machine that couldn't have happened because of aur, such as building a version of firefox faster than google chrome.